School for Combat

Like any other soldiers, airmen learn more in a few hours of fighting than in months of training; the smart ones convert their varied experiences to new techniques of battle. Last week on the palm-and pine-dotted sands of central Florida the Army Air Forces showed how it was spreading these new arts of war through squadrons fighting around the world.

The Air Forces headquarters for combat expertness is a postgraduate school. Its name: the Army Air Forces School of Applied Tactics, at Orlando. There air men learn such new developments as Chennault's winning mass-fighter tactics; the deadly skip-bombing developed by the late Major William G. Benn of MacArthur's Air Force; the countless tricks of navigation, gunnery and high-altitude bombing developed the hard way by Ira Eaker's Flying Fortressmen and Liberator crews over France and Germany.

The Vertical Approach. At Dunnellon Field, one of the bases in AAFSAT's 15,500-sq.-mi. domain, visiting newsmen gawked at three Mustang fighter-bombers circling almost soundlessly at 8,000 feet. One by one they peeled off, grew in size and sound as they hurtled earthward.

At 1,000 feet bombs blossomed from their racks, plummeted earthward, plunked into a 100-foot target circle with bright flashes, belches of flame and smoke. It was nice shooting. But the center of the target, a cloth-covered frame, still stood.

The Low Approach. The Mustangs whined up and away. While they watched them shrink into the sky, the visitors heard a new, deep-bodied roar. Over the trees thundered the first of a flight of nine cigar-bodied, high-tailed A20 attack bombers (the British call them Havocs).

By the time they were in sight their bomb doors gaped. From the bellies bombs fell away, seemed to stay in formation with the speeding craft as they shot toward the target. The first bomb hit the ground short of the target, bounced, ripped through. The next three went smack through it. The planes that followed had nothing left but the circle. No bomb missed it. Major Benn's skip-bombing lesson had come home.

The Varied Approach. The A-20s had disappeared behind the trees and contours of the ground. No, here they were again. Seeming to run ahead of their own sound, they came in from all quarters, strafing the field at zero altitude with simulated machine-gun fire. No one gunner could have followed all of them, or even two of them, in their complicated crisscross of attack.

And no academician with books and slide rule could have calculated their attack in advance. It was the experience of living combat airmen and their dead comrades that had worked out the pattern for the attack, now used from the Aleutians to New Guinea, from Burma to Europe's battlefield.

Not all of them had been Americans. From the rich trove of British experience AAFSAT has taken vast treasure, brought it home to give to its students. Its faculty has culled the best from German tactics, studied the Russian, cudgeled its own brain for refinement of what war has already taught and for new uses of old tactical experiments now all but forgotten.

Fighters at Work. Closest of all, the faculty of AAFSAT watches the combat areas (where most of its members have served in this war). There, they know by experience, is where the true research is being sweated out. As a new technique is developed, airmen who have worked it out are brought home to teach it. Thus AAFSAT's faculty is as fluid as the lore it teaches.

Its student body is more fluid still. Every month 4,500 airmen will go through the course (present enrollment: 3,100). All are graduates of specialized schools--e.g. bombardment, pursuit, intelligence--and all are headed directly for the front. In the first half of their month their work is in the classrooms; in the latter half in the air, ranging over AAFSAT's battle country and out over the Gulf on missions. Next stop for all: combat outfits. Carefully selected, they are sent to key posts where they can spread the lessons they have learned.

For what U.S. airpower has done in the past few months, and for what it will do before war's end, AAFSAT will share the glory that once went haphazard to discoverers in many battle areas. In its career of only two and a half months, flyers have already seen the answer to an old prayer: a school where airmen can learn what battle has taught before they go out to fight and learn more.

Says AAFSAT's commandant, veteran airman Brigadier General Hume Peabody: "It's the realization of a dream. When I was called down to run it, it revived my faith in Santa Claus."

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